Tomboy With Notebooks

Tomboy With Notebooks
Originally uploaded by rb3wreath

It's basically the end of my pseudo "Hack Week" and I totally got sidetracked from what I was originally going to work on. Instead of working on tasks (sorry), I decided to yank tags out of the UI and replace it with Notebooking support.

The screenshot shown here is really rough. We still need to get some icons, but in general, the Notebooking is implemented enough to get an idea of how it should work.

It's committed to SVN Trunk if you want to give it a whirl. There are some bugs right now in SVN Trunk: 1) a note with a tag that gets deleted gets recreated again, 2) tomboy's tray icon menu is horked (we'll fix this).

More information about Notebooks can be found here: http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Notebooks

If you own a banjo...

My Gibson RB-3 Wreath Banjo

...you should have a banjo mute!

I've tried out a few banjo mutes throughout the years and have finally found one that actually works. It works without buzzing, distorting the sound, or falling off. It does what it should; make the banjo bearable to the rest of the family when you're practicing.

I just finished practicing some fast-paced songs with the mute on, while sitting near my wife. The cool thing is that she didn't ask me to play more quietly at all.

The Stidd Banjo Mute (Marriage Saver)

This banjo mute was built by one of my friends. He's sold a few of them, but I'm sure he could sell many more. All he needs to do is market them to the spouses of banjo players. Now where do they hang out; Spouses of Banjo Players Anonymous?

Burning some ITO for Tomboy

I'm finally getting around to using some ITO time awarded during Novell's Hack Week. Since I haven't really had the time to work on Tomboy, that's where I'll be focusing for the week (that's right, I'm gonna use up five whole days).

Some things I'm interested in looking at:

• General bugfixing
• I just patched tomboy-reminder to work as an add-in
  
• Tasks (working in conjunction with sontek on this)
• Tagging (if kkubasik needs a hand)
• Something else? Please convince me soon!
  

PackageKit with zypp (alpha quality) backend for openSUSE 10.3

Thanks to rock-star thoenig we now have PackageKit (with zypp) building and installing in openSUSE 10.3.

If you're among the crazy who'd like to try this out, here's what you'll need to do:

1. Add my openSUSE Build Service repository (Yast -> Software Repositories -> Add)
• http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/btimothy/openSUSE_10.3
2. Install the following packages from that repository (I don't specify ALL of them because the required ones should be picked up as dependencies automatically):
• gnome-packagekit
• PolicyKit-gnome
• dbus-1
3. Fix up the permissions on /lib/dbus-1/dbus-daemon-launch-helper
   
• As root, run the following
• chown root:messagebus /lib/dbus-1/dbus-daemon-launch-helper
• chmod 770 /lib/dbus-1/dbus-daemon-launch-helper
• chmod +s /lib/dbus-1/dbus-daemon-launch-helper
4. Try a simple test to list your repos
• As a standard user, run the following from a terminal
  
• pkcon get repos (non-graphical version)
• pk-repo (GUI version)
  

Some caveats/bewares:

• Is this bug-free? Absolutely not! Please help! :)
• Why do some simple actions take FOREVER? Well, probably two different reasons: 1) I am not really a libzypp expert and have probably written crappy code, 2) zypp does refreshes, iterates over all its packages, etc. for package resolution. I'm sure that over time, libzypp will be easier to use and faster.
• Sometimes things are failing, why? `pkcon refresh` and `pkcon force-refresh` are two things I don't really have implemented correctly. Sometimes I've had to run (as root) `zypper refresh` just to kind of clean things up. PackageKit wants most things to NOT cause a refresh of your local repo cache (thank goodness).
• I've only ever really tried installing pacakges that don't have any other uninstalled dependencies. You're on your own if you go beyond this.
  

Some things to try:

• pk-application (This is the main GTK application for searching/installing/removing packages)
• search for a simple package like lynx and try installing it
• you'll see PolicyKit-gnome in action prompt you for a root password (woot!)
  
• pkcon install lynx
• command-line way to install a package
• pkcon search name
• command-line search for a package
• pk-backend-status
• GUI utility to show you what PackageKit backend methods we've implemented (or at least started)
• `pkcon get actions` is the command-line equivalent
• pk-transaction-viewer
• GUI utility to show you all the transactions (installs, uninstallls) you've done using PackageKit

More information:

• More developer information about writing a Package Kit backend can be found here: http://www.packagekit.org/pk-reference.html
• Want to help out? Join #PackageKit on irc.freenode.net. I'm usually there (btimothy)...at least during the day.

Okay, back to figuring out how to get a list of dependencies from zypp...

Tomboy Hack Night this Friday

John (sontek in #tomboy) has organized a Tomboy Hacknight this Friday. So, even if you can't be here physically, go ahead and join us in IRC and help us out. We're mostly going to be focusing on note tagging and reworking the tasks addin. But, if you've got something else even more cool in mind, don't hesitate to let us know.

As a side note, I just saw a little video ad about a book called "To-Do List". Since we're attempting to build tasks/todos into Tomboy, I'm curious how much we'd be able to learn about how people really use todo lists by reading the book. Have you read this book? Let me know! I guess this is at least one thing I could "ask Santa for Christmas" that's not well over $100. :)